An accountant I respect greatly keeps three notebooks.
One for cash sales, one for credit sales and one he calls, without a trace of irony, the “reconciliation book,” whose entire job is to explain why the first two never agree.
He has done this for 11 years. He is very good at it.
He can find any transaction from 2019 in under four minutes, which is either an impressive feat of memory or a quiet tragedy, depending on how you choose to look at it.
This is not a column about accountants.
It is a column about how many businesses in Bulawayo are, structurally, three notebooks pretending to be a system and how much of that paper is one spilled cup of tea, one termite season, or one careless cousin away from disappearing entirely.
I have met business owners who could recite their entire debtors’ list from memory, the way some people recite scripture and who treated this as a skill rather than a warning sign.
“Custom software” is not a phrase reserved for banks and mines.
- Revisiting Majaivana’s last show… ‘We made huge losses’
- Edutainment mix: The nexus of music and cultural identity
- ChiTown acting mayor blocks election
- Promoter Mdu 3D defends foreigners 30 minute set
Keep Reading
Say the words “custom software” in most rooms in Bulawayo and people picture something enormous a system built for a bank with three hundred branches or a mine tracking tonnage across a whole province.
Almost nobody pictures a five person shop in Gwanda or Nkulumane and that is precisely the misunderstanding costing them money. Custom software, at its simplest, is just a system built to match how your business works, instead of forcing your business to work around a system or a notebook that was never designed for it.
It does not need to be dramatic. It just needs to remember things more reliably than a human being who is also trying to serve customers, answer the phone and keep an eye on the till at the same time.
A POS terminal at a supermarket till and a school fees register kept in an exercise book are, underneath the surface, solving the same problem: someone needs to know what came in, what went out and what is still owed, without having to ask three different people and hope their memories agree. The supermarket solved it with a machine. The school solved it with a book and a prayer that nobody spills anything on it.
Only one of those solutions survives a bad week, a burst pipe or an overenthusiastic goat that has developed a taste for paper.
The businesses most in need of a proper system rarely notice they need one, because the pain arrives in small, forgettable doses a stock count that never quite matches, a debtor nobody remembers chasing, an hour lost every Friday transcribing the week’s sales from a book into a phone calculator or worse, into another book.
None of these moments feels like an emergency on its own.
Add them up over a year, though and you are looking at real money spent finding information that a system would simply have shown you the moment you asked.
There is also a quieter cost that rarely makes it into anyone’s budget: the owner who cannot take a week off because the business lives entirely in their own head and their own handwriting.
A proper system does not just save time. It makes a business survivable without its owner standing over it every single day, which is a strange kind of freedom that most people only appreciate the first time they get sick.
The good news is that fixing this rarely means throwing the notebook away on day one.
It usually starts with a conversation about how the paper moves through the business today what gets written down, by whom and why before a single line of software gets written. Understand the notebook properly first and the system that replaces it stops being a leap of faith and becomes, quite simply, the next page.
- Wilfred Munyaradzi Kahlari is a cybersecurity expert, software developer and consultant at Kingwil Consultants. He works with boards, government institutions and businesses to strengthen digital governance and build resilient technology frameworks. For engagements: [email protected] | +263 772 212 796.
